Note:Now I realize that not everyone categorizes snow as a Simple Pleasurewhen it comes to the logistical challenges of what to do with homebound kids on snow days or how you’ll get to work. Not to mention, shoveling the driveway & walks, de-icing the car & traipsing through dirty, salty slush. But as they say, if we can’t beat it, we might as well join it; or at the very least, enjoy it vicariously through the pictures below.

Snow, Snow,Snow,Snow

Zeal

to

Live Life Well

TM

Hello & Welcome!

When it snows, ain't it thrilling,

Though your nose gets a chilling

We'll frolic and play, the Eskimo way,

Walking in a winter wonderland.

Frisco, CO

Baby, it’s cold outside. So cold you can see our breath condense in the freezing air. (Just writing that caused me to sneeze twice.)

What powder hound can resist the first snowfall of the season, a white Christmas, an official snow day (that is, enough of the fluffy white stuff to stop life as we know it & cocoon us indoors), or opening day on the slopes?

It's a marshmallow world in the winter

when the snow comes to cover the ground.

It's the time for play; it's a whipped cream day.

I wait for it the whole year round.

At the first sight of snow the fun begins, but it really starts tosnowball when we get hit with a headline-catching winter storm. We’re not talking miserly accumulations of 3 or even 6 inches, but one that rages for a day or so & buries us in a foot of the white stuff before relenting to sun-washed skies.

When the snow falls in Colorado, something magical happens. The snow in this part of the west is the alchemy of dream. Having lost much of its heavy moisture further west (dried out by the desert), when it finally collides with the Rockies it’s as dry as talc and as fluffy as goose down.

Powder hounds flock here for classic western skiing. I love the lifestyle rhapsodized by ski bum-dom, only without the skis. While heading outdoors in the West may mean schussing downhill for most, I prefer to play in the white stuff on snowshoes. To be adrift in the snow and silence of solitude on a peaceful snowshoe trail is, for me, pure powder bliss.